


The Confession

by doubledecks



Category: Tintin - All Media Types
Genre: Confessional, Fluff and Crack, Gen, Religious Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-07-23 09:11:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16156022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doubledecks/pseuds/doubledecks
Summary: Tintin goes to confession.





	The Confession

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned….it’s been…”

Tintin paused. He honestly couldn’t remember.

“Well - it’s been a time, and I -” Each word felt like it sucked the air out of him. It was hard to keep his voice from wavering. He gathered his nerve and looked ahead; anywhere but at the screen.

“Well,” he said again. Silence. He placed his hands on his knees and locked his elbows, waiting for any sort of indication he should continue, but there was nothing.

Swallowing, Tintin spoke again.

“I made a friend,” he said, wincing a little at how insistent he sounded. The phrase made him feel like some overgrown schoolyard outcast, a proud and pitiful recluse trying desperately to prove he was capable of kinship with his fellow man. And in many ways, he supposed, he was.

“We met under chaotic circumstances,” he continued. “He’d been extorted, and - well, I decided that I wanted to help him.”

Tintin paused again, but there was no response. He wondered what the priest might be thinking: perhaps that he was the victim of some sort of fraud, that he had come here to lament his wasted time or money. Nonetheless, it was obvious he was expected to go on.

“We did get back what was his, but his dignity still suffered,” Tintin said. “I could tell.”

For a brief moment he seriously considered just getting up and leaving. He could play it through in his head, how he would split for the exit once he was out - for a second it almost felt as if he really was standing up and opening the door, but the impulse passed without his so much as budging an inch.

“One of the men who’d extorted him had been like a brother to him,” the journalist continued. “They’d known each other for well over a decade. He wasn’t coping with that very well at all.”

He laced his fingers together, doing his best not to wring them.

“I came to see him often, to make sure he was getting on...he has an appetence for drink, you see, and I thought perhaps I might help him with that too.”

Now it sounded as if he was pleading, trying to smother the fact of the matter in a list of good deeds, and he definitely was wringing his hands now - chagrined, he put them on his thighs again, finding his palms somewhat damp.

“And, well - when I first met him I had thought him a bit of a fool,” Tintin admitted. “The first time I ever spoke to him, we were quarreling. And the whole time we were struggling to have him recompensed, we quarrelled. But, the thing is…it felt _good_. To quarrel, I mean. It was...exciting. People agree with me so often I sometimes wish they rather wouldn’t.”

Tintin’s hands had found one another again and he shrewdly separated them.

“Sometimes when things quieted down we would resolve not to speak because we were both so stubborn. And then I would just seek him out to quarrel some more; I couldn’t let him be! I refused to accept that he was luckless; I’d thought he had just got himself into misfortune by being too blind, and trusting...”

He swallowed again.

“After the rights to his property were restored I almost didn’t want to bother with it anymore. I visited once to say goodbye, but had the most marvelous time talking to him I couldn’t help but see him again. It was as if he was a different person. And that’s when I noticed that there was something weighing on him, and when he told me the man who had done this was his dearest friend, I couldn’t handle it.”

Tintin paused once more. As the silence dragged on it occurred to him that it likely sounded as if he had murdered someone, so he quickly pressed on,  
  
“I couldn’t sleep that night. I was angry; profoundly angry. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so angry.” 

He heaved a little sigh of mortal strain.

“What makes a person do something like that? It’s one thing to hate another person - to strike out at them or to steal from them - but to dash such a long and precious friendship on the rocks as if it was nothing…? Over money...?” Tintin felt as a fish out of water, gasping for air as he became more incensed. “It simply didn’t figure to me at all. It still doesn’t.”

The silence that followed was deafening.

“I’m sorry, Father, for yelling,” Tintin added.

He sat quiet for a time. Unsure what to do, he slid his palms down the sides of his legs in an effort to dry them off.

“The point is that, I...I…” He winced again, imagining the confessor thinking him rather suspect for the company he kept, but it wouldn’t matter anyway, for he definitely wasn’t going to like what Tintin said next.

“The point is that I’ve grown rather fond of him,” Tintin said. “We would spend Saturdays together - and then it was Tuesdays and Saturdays, I think - and now it’s as if a day isn’t complete without my seeing him. He’s not a fool at all. He’s intelligent, and thoughtful, and he’s - a good friend. A very good friend.”

He repeated this staunchly almost as if reassuring himself; it felt hot in the booth, and the air felt like steel wool in his throat, and, tired of his hands meandering about with their incessant fidgeting, he sat on them, which is something he hadn’t done in a very long time.

“He, uh,” Tintin said nervously. “I don’t know what it is.”

His breaths came uneven.

“But when I look at him sometimes…”

He glanced up at the screen. It was dark behind the grating.

“When I look at him sometimes I want to… to _know_ him,” Tintin blurted, and his face creased with the disgrace of it, but then he was up and running again, bolder than before.

“I-I-I-I don’t even know how that would feel, I don’t even know h-” he bleated. It felt so hot in the little cabinet - indicative of where he was likely heading - but he couldn’t find it in himself to care now. “He’s never - given me any indication to feel anything but brotherhood, and I’m cursed.”

He sucked in a big breath through his nose, trying to steel himself, but up it rose again, like a heavy dinner taken too late:

“Since we’ve become friends, he’s never done anything but show me trust, and confidence,” Tintin said. He felt like he was referring to himself as another kind of villain in the business of abusing amity; a villain who loved too much. “He doesn’t know I have these thoughts. He has needs, too - but he never acts upon them. He becomes smitten with women when he talks to them, I can see it; but he never offers to make their acquaintance! I can’t tell if he’s a saint or if he can feel my jealousy; if he’s confused by it as I am.”

He pulled his hands out from under him. They were drenched with sweat.

“I’ve not once acted upon this other than in thought,” the reporter confided. “Not even by myself, not even in the night.”

His mouth was dry. It felt all the moisture had gathered in his hands. They felt unclean.

“It hurts,” he said.

He ended it there, just short of breaking into sobs - emotionally drained and really quite devoid of any sense at all, he managed to tide himself back into a state of tentative calm as he waited for his penance.

Evidently, it was a lot to take in. But as the silence stretched on, Tintin found himself wondering if he hadn’t inadvertently shocked the priest into a state of melancholy. Perhaps his voice had been too distinct; perhaps his confessor had recognized him from the radio, or from meeting him in person, and now he was mourning for the man he thought Tintin once was...

A sly part of him, older than time it seemed, considered that as he had committed no sins of the flesh, he should really be forgiven quite easily. But then this was the part of him that had used to skip mass as a child to lie in creek beds, to carve jagged little faces and shapes into the paneling of the sacristy with a penknife when no one was in the nave.

As time wore on Tintin’s concern turned to bewilderment, then misgiving. Something wasn’t right.

“A...Are you there, Father?”

He knocked on the grille, which was comically ineffective, and then he squinted, trying to see if he could make out the shape of anyone on the other side. There was nothing but black.

After a time, he became wary, and eventually, he exited the booth. He was relieved to find the church empty.

“Father?” he called again, knocking on the door adjacent. There was no response.

Tintin opened the door.  
  
“GREAT - shit,” he uttered, signing the cross for his curse, and then his shoulders dropped.

He reached in and grabbed the priest by the collar, picking him up easily and depositing him onto the floor.

Straw spilled from his cassock. His melon head bounced and then popped off its broomstick neck, spilling pulp all over the aisle before coming to rest at the edge of a pew. The face had been crudely drawn on with an oil crayon, and judging from the look of it, Tintin was the least of this fellow’s problems.

“...What?” Tintin whimpered feebly, still very much depleted from all that he’d just professed to a fruit - even then, his brain irritably began to hash the situation.

There was a note pinned to the cassock. Tintin tore it from the pin without a thought to preserving the evidence and read it, dully mouthing along with the words.

As if in a dream, he left the scene and drifted out onto the street, francs in hand. At the first phone he found, he placed a call.

“Yes, Thompson? I’ve - no, this is Tintin. _Tintin._ Yes. Oh, I’m sorry, Thomson. How am I doing? Not, uh - well, I’m not quite sure. No matter - look, I have a note, here; someone’s apparently been kidnapping priests for ransom and leaving - oh? Solved, you say? In custody? I’ll be right over.”

It was a little too far to have run, Tintin reasoned, as he crashed up against the side of the police station coughing and heaving - waving Thompson on to urge him back up the stairs when the latter came rushing out, he followed the two detectives up to their office.

“Your face is red as a plum; did you run all the way down here?” Thomson said.

“No, I’ve got the bends,” Tintin retorted, in no mood.

“Just awful,” Thompson said.

“To be precise, miserable,” Thomson added. “I hope it gets better.”

When they arrived at the office, Tintin stopped in his tracks.

“These are the culprits,” Thompson announced.

Two boys, one looking to be around eleven and the other on the odd end of eight, sat by the desk looking rather nonplussed.

The elder, a boy with a red turtleneck and black beret, had his arms folded. “We’ve told you everything! We didn’t think anybody was actually gonna send in the ransom! Nobody likes Father Desmet; he’s humorless and stingy - he wouldn’t know fun if it knocked him down the stairs! He’s an absolute grump!”

The other, a blond boy in a green jumper and scarf, looked more anxious. “We’re not going to go to prison, are we?” he asked quietly. He was quite well-spoken for his age. “Because if you’re going to tell my mother, I’d much rather go to prison.”

“Father Desmet was actually found at the bottom of the staircase with a sprained ankle; then a bookcase had fallen on him, which complicated things,” Thomson said. “A few minor bruises and scrapes, but he’ll be back on his feet again soon enough.”

“We didn’t do that,” the boy in the beret interjected.

“We were only showing him the sculpture we’d made of him! But then he chose to have a tumble down the stairs instead, which I thought was quite rude,” the younger said.

“Well?” Thompson queried, turning to Tintin. “What are your thoughts on the matter?”

Tintin didn’t have any thoughts. He tried to think of anything to say, but he couldn’t. Aggravation bubbled beneath his skin, almost threatening to turn into something akin to ire, but there was no way anyone could have known. In fact, nobody knew. His secret was still safe.

He regarded the older boy for a moment, trying to read his motivation for doing something so obtuse, but he could only see himself as a boy, happily chipping away at the wood of the sacristy for absolutely no reason at all. There was almost even a smugness to the boy’s expression, a pride in having misbehaved, and Tintin heaved another weary sigh, looking at the ceiling.

“Just...send them home,” he said. “I’m going to bed.”

“Home?” Thomson gasped.

“Bed?” Thompson cried.

“Tintin!” they shouted.

“If they do it again tell the little one’s mother,” Tintin called down the hall before disappearing through the front door.

**Author's Note:**

> Quick and Flupke were created by Hergé in 1930, one year after Tintin.


End file.
